Cold Case Files - REOPENED: Déjà Vu

Episode Date: December 19, 2023

In the fall of 1996, a 25-year-old school teacher was found murdered in the bathtub of her Arlington, Texas apartment. Three months later, a 22-year-old woman was found murdered in the bathtub of her Arlington, Texas apartment - located in the very same complex. The crime scenes looked virtually identical, but it would take police four years to trace these two murders back to the killer who committed them.Sponsors:Cozy: And here’s our gift to YOU this holiday season. Go to CozyEarth.com and enter code CCF to save up to FORTY percent.Zocdoc: Go to Zocdoc.com/CCF and download the Zocdoc app for FREE. Then find and book a top-rated doctor today.Progressive: Press play on comparing auto rates. Quote at Progressive.com to join the over 28 million drivers who trust Progressive. 

On September 17th, 1996, a man returned home to find his girlfriend murdered in the apartment they shared in Arlington, Texas. She was face down in the bathtub bound by duct tape with evidence pointing to strangulation and rape. The police investigated the boyfriend, but soon realized he wasn't the culprit. Three months later on Christmas, another woman was found murdered in her apartment in Arlington, Texas. Her body was bound by duct tape, and she had been strangled and raped. She, too, was found in the bathtub. Police needed to find this bathtub killer, and fast, before he could hurt anyone else. But the DNA they collected was useless without a suspect.

What other connections were there between these seemingly unrelated victims? What evidence could they have missed? From A&E, this is Cold Case Files. I'm Brooke, and here's the legend himself, Bill Curtis, with the classic case, Deja Vu. Well, if I remember correctly, it was about 5.30 in the afternoon. Ed Featherston is a veteran detective with the Arlington Police Department. Arlington is quiet on a Tuesday in 1996 until Featherston catches a homicide call. 2200 block of Henderson, if I remember correctly,

is where I got it, and that's the... that was the old pear tree, plum tree apartments. It's a nice building. It's a nice apartment complex. Nice on the outside, but inside apartment 816, a 25-year-old school teacher named Christine Vu lies dead. Well, when I first arrived on scene, there are uniformed police officers who are all over this apartment complex who are locating, interviewing, and identifying witnesses. Tang Chi Koo is there at the apartment.

Tang Koo is Christine Vu's live-in boyfriend. It was Koo who called 911 after discovering his girlfriend's body. He was very, very distraught. He was screaming. He wanted the police to go find somebody and find who did it. Koo tells police he came home early from work and found the door to the apartment deadbolted from the inside. So I think, okay, maybe she's in the restroom.

I went back to the car and smoked a cigarette. And then after I finished my cigarette, I went back and tried again, but nope. Ku tells police he called the apartment from a nearby payphone, but Christine didn't pick up. So this time I went back to apartment and I tried the key, but the door is actually not, it's no longer locked.

So I just pushed it in and I went inside. Inside the apartment, Ku tells police he found Christine bound with duct tape and face down in the bathtub, strangled to death. And then I call 911. It's a story that sends up red flags for veteran detective Ed Featherston.

You know, he says, I came there, the door was locked, I knocked on the door, I smoked a cigarette, she still didn't answer the door, I thought she the door was locked. I knocked on the door, smoked a cigarette. She still didn't answer the door. I thought she was using the bathroom. I go to the gym facilities inside the apartment complex, call her on the phone, nobody answers. I come back, try the door one more time. Lo and behold, it's open.

At that point, I'm real suspicious. That suspicion is heightened when Featherston finds no sign of forced entry. Seaman recovered from the body confirms Vu was raped before she was killed. Experience tells Featherston the search for his killer might be a short one. In cases like this, quite often,

it turns out to be a domestic-related homicide as opposed to a stranger. At that particular incident, Tang Chi Koo was my number one person of great interest. You can do to me whatever you want. You want to put me in jail, fine. The prime suspect cooperates with police, providing hair and blood samples

and answering the hard questions, all the while maintaining his innocence. It is a claim that gets a boost when results from the crime lab come in. Leighton fingerprints were developed in various areas of the apartment, but primarily what turned out to be the important one was on the deadbolt lock that was interior only. You can see the scar. This is the fingerprint lifted from the deadbolt lock in Christine Vu's apartment.

That Leighton print did not match her boyfriend, her, or any of the officers, medical staff, or investigators at the scene. So we now have an unknown person who was at that scene, and it's our first clue that his story might actually be correct, that he was sitting outside smoking a cigarette while she's being killed in the apartment. The unknown print raises just enough doubt to keep the cuffs off Tang Ku.

Meanwhile, a killer remains free, watching and waiting. This is a good environment when you're eating because if there's something that's sensitive, you can bring it up at the dinner table. Brenda Norwood and her family are a tight-knit group. For them, Christmas Eve is family time. We were all in the kitchen cooking and getting things prepared,

and then my niece called me, and she said, I hadn't been able to get in touch with Wendy. 22-year-old Wendy Prescott was expected for dinner. By 11 PM, she's still a no-show, and Aunt Brenda begins to worry. Brenda and her husband drive to the Pear Tree apartment complex and climb the stairs to Wendy's apartment. There, they find their niece naked,

face down in the bathtub. At first, you just think it's not real. But just to step in there and see her float in that tub, and her body's lifeless. And her little hands were out, too, and they were balled up in a fist. The person that did this is a monster. Arlington detective Tommy Lenore catches the call.

Once I got into the scene scene and once I looked around, I then immediately recognized that this was identical to the Christine Vu murder. Deja vu was the word. Detective Ed Featherston joins Lenore at the scene, haunted by a feeling that he's been there before. Floorplan, furniture, carpet color, wall color, the color of the decoration, the design, floral design on the walls of the bathroom are identical. Obviously, the most obvious similarities in these crime scenes was the manner in which the victims were bound with duct tape. Wendy Prescott's killer leaves behind at least two critical pieces of evidence for detectives.

The first is semen recovered from the victim's body. The second, a single unknown fingerprint pressed into the dust of a TV stand. We immediately preserve this area because with being a dust print, any wind, any movement, even our movement as far as walking past in the breeze that we create could potentially destroy this print. So we have, I say, one chance to photograph it, and once we try to do anything with it, it's most likely going to be ruined. The dust print is from a thumb

and therefore cannot be positively matched to the index fingerprint from Christine Vu's apartment. Semen recovered at each of the crime scenes, however, carries the same genetic profile, confirming the bathtub slayings are the work of one man. And that man is not Teng Koo. In some way, it makes you feel very uncomfortable because, you know, under the law,

they say, well, you are innocent until proven guilty. But, no, in reality, it's the reverse. You are guilty, and you have to prove yourself you're innocent. You know, his story in itself is horrible, is a nightmare, because he was actually there as the crime was occurring. Yes, his story in itself is horrible, is a nightmare, because he was actually there as the crime was occurring. Yes, he's a focus of suspicion. When it was an isolated incident, that's natural.

You always look at who's closest to the victim. But once the second crime occurred, and once we saw the genetic link, and once we excluded him, then in our eyes, he's a victim as well. A victim of a serial killer who is still on the loose, stalking the women of Arlington, Texas, and pushing police to the limit. Now you know there's an individual

that's not only hit twice, but hit twice within three months. And so not only are we burdened with finding this person, but now we have to protect our community, and we have to worry when this person is going to hit again. There was absolute mass chaos. The tenants in this complex and their relatives and their loved ones and their family all knew on the morning, on Christmas morning, that the same person, it was very likely that the same person that killed Wendy Prescott was the person that killed Christine Vu.

Tommy Lenore is a detective with the Arlington Police Department. On Christmas morning, 1996, he and Detective Ed Featherston find themselves with a problem. Women living in the Pear Tree apartment complex are being raped and killed, and people are beginning to panic. All the single young ladies in this apartment complex are moving out literally in droves,

and certainly I can't blame them. That creates tremendous headaches for us because everyone moving out the way they did can actually camouflage the suspect moving out. Detectives may not have control over the exodus of tenants, but they do, however, have a significant amount of forensic evidence, including DNA and unknown fingerprints found at each crime scene. And then I thought, well, let's just run it through APHIS,

which is the American Fingerprint Identification System. And I thought, hot dog, we're going to get hit because this guy is not going to be the first time he's ever done anything wrong. He just didn't wake up one day and say, hey, I'm going to go kill somebody. The unknown prints, however, do not return a match in APHIS. Now detectives look to DNA to make their case. The DNA we know. We know that's our suspect. We actually have the suspect in laboratory custody.

But we don't know who that suspect is. You immediately think, who could have done this? Who knows these two ladies? The hunt for suspects leads detectives right back to the Pear Tree apartment complex. You're talking about occupants, people who are associated with occupants, people who work here. Who is it that, what vantage point

did someone have where they could watch these ladies? And then when you focus here, we're going to focus on the known offenders here. These are your systematic case books. They're in chronological order. In the months that follow, Lenore and Featherston blanket the Pear Tree Apartments, running down hundreds of leads. This was a massive canvas. You take a look at this one right here, as a matter of fact, this one just simply says that this guy worked for an air conditioning company and that he was absent from work on both days that Christine Boo and Wendy Prescott were murdered. That's the type of lead you're going to have to follow them.

This was an interesting one right here. This guy changed all the locks in the apartment complex. A really intriguing suspect, there was an individual that lived across the hallway from Wendy, who during the Christine Vu case actually lived across the hall from her. That suspect is just one of hundreds asked to forfeit blood or saliva samples for DNA testing. We're dragging DNA from everybody who walked, walked, moved to Breed inside this place. After several months, Ed and I were very well known out here.

Okay, they thought we were a couple of vampires because we were getting blood samples from everybody. DNA samples begin pouring into the crime lab. This is what's called an electrophair cramp, which depicts the DNA profile of an individual. Criminalist Connie Patton runs each against the killer's profile. In the beginning, we received batches of anywhere from 10, 15, sometimes 20 samples at a time. And I can tell you in this particular case, there were four or five times that I went home saying to myself and saying to my partners,

we got him. It's him. In this particular case, we would just look at the... Over a period of years, the suspect samples were processed and none of their types matched, so they were all excluded. It's a major downer. I mean, you just crash. After 18 months, DNA clears 102 suspects with no match in sight. Another 200 suspects are cleared through alibi or fingerprints. Meanwhile, an uneasy peace settles upon Arlington.

The man dubbed the bathtub killer appears to have stopped killing. You keep waiting for that other shoe to drop. When's that guy gonna hit again? And has he hit again and we just don't know about it? You would think that someone who committed these crimes within three months time, it was pretty remarkable that he stopped.

And you wonder why he hasn't hit again, but you hope to God that he doesn't. Two women were found murdered. Both had been strangled and raped. The killer left their bodies bound by duct tape in their half-full bathtubs. Both lived in the same apartment complex in Arlington, Texas. This bathtub killer had left behind his DNA and a fingerprint. But after 18 months, investigators had only used the evidence to clear over 100 people. With each suspect that was tested and cleared, the killer was gifted more time as a free man. Was he planning another attack,

or was there another reason that he had become inactive? Investigators would find out the answer to that question 18 months later. All right, this is the 600 block of Davis. The police station is right up here. Derek Robinson is a detective. His beat, the University of Texas at Arlington. In this area over here is Greek Row. There's a lot of fraternity houses and sorority houses, as you can see over here now. In the early morning hours of February 23, 1999,

Robinson responds to a report of sexual assault at the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority house. The victim was beaten pretty badly. Part of her face was swollen. Her eye was completely, one of her eyes was completely swollen shut. No amount of counseling or antidepressants or anything will take away that night. The victim is Shima Benson, a 22-year-old senior at UTA.

I was sound asleep, and I just felt in my chest this overwhelming dread. Sheema tells Detective Robinson she awoke to find a strange man in her bedroom. He said, do what I say, and I won't kill you. And he has a gun to my head at this point. And the first thing that pops in my head is, well, let me bite him. And then I bit him and that infuriated him.

And that's when he started beating on me. And he left me like on the floor, naked, bloody, bruised, you know, incapacitated. And the fact that I was, you know, kind of like, where am I, what's going on, and you know. A rape kit examination provides investigators with the attacker's semen, and Shima provides them with a physical description. She was able to tell that he was a black male, he was light-complected,

and she was able to give us a relatively good height and weight description. First thing we do is we distribute it among campus. The story makes the news, and it's not long before a tip comes in to the Arlington PD. I received a phone call from a young lady who was one of Wendy Prescott's very best friends. Matter of fact, she was the last person to see Wendy alive. She called me and said, Detective Lenore, do you know about the girl? Her words are, do you know about the girl

that was raped at the sorority house at UTA? And I said, yes, I know about that. And she said, that should have been me. And she goes, not only should that have been me, but that's the same person that killed Wendy. The caller gives Detective Lenore the name of a suspect, her ex-boyfriend turned stalker. She described an individual who was stalking her

and found out that she lived at that sorority house. She even stayed in the same room that that young girl that was sexually assaulted was in. She recently moved out to get away from that stalker. So based on that information from this young lady, I contacted Detective Robinson, and I asked Detective Robinson if we could have the DNA from his case compared to the DNA from Wendy Prescott and Christine Vu.

Approximately two or three days later, we get a genetic link. DNA testing confirms Sheema Benson's attacker is the same man who raped and killed Christine Vu and Wendy Prescott. Detective Lenore tracks down the stalker suspect named by the caller, but finds that man's DNA does not match the profile of the serial killer. The investigation, however, has moved forward. Detectives can now exclude more than two-thirds of their original suspect pool and focus only on men who fit the physical description

of Shema Benson's attacker. He is an African-American male, appeared to be in his mid-20s. The suspect's physical profile also includes a most unusual detail. And then I bit him. It's a painful souvenir of his run-in with Shema Benson. And that's an injury that was very remarkable.

It was an injury to his penis, and it was an injury that more than likely would not heal very quickly. Every one I sat across from and looked at you, I'm looking at him, and I'm looking in her eyes, and I'm thinking, are you the monster? For three years, Detective Tommy Lenore has tracked his monster, an African-American man

who raped and killed two women, then raped a third, but let her live. It is this change in criminal behavior that piques Lenore's interest. We need to go back now and start looking at these sexual assaults that we didn't look at before. And now we need to start going forward and looking at this because this man is changing. Lenore puts out an APB on the suspect, including details of a battle scar suffered

during the last assault. We even incorporated that this person may have a defect to his penis simply because of an injury. And quite frankly, that's one of the things that led us to the Grand Prairie offense. In the nearby town of Grand Prairie, DNA links another unsolved rape to Lenore's suspect, bringing the running total of victims to four. By the summer of 1999, however,

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available in all states and situations. This is the demographic book from the Pear Tree Apartments. He returns to his deepest pool of suspects, men who lived at the Pear Tree Apartment Complex, site of both murders. When this is resolved, we're going to find out this person is on this list and right under our nose. If everyone was absolutely cooperative, we would clear them probably in three to four days a person.

The work is painstaking and ultimately thankless, as no new suspects can be developed. Meanwhile, science is on the march and about to offer Lenore's investigation a quantum leap forward. This is the, uh, SiegesLink from the Criminal Justice Department. Sergeant Gary Krohn is a cop who keeps up with technology. And it's talking about the new FBI iAFIS system.

iAFIS is the latest version of fingerprint analysis software, capable of rotating a print 360 degrees and detecting points of comparison where before there were none. It was just such better technology. I thought, what an opportunity for us just to see what would happen because we hadn't used this before. Sergeant Crone thinks back to the 1996 Pear Tree apartment murders.

And they had been unsolved. We had really good latent prints on that case. And it was just a hope that we would be able to get a positive result. Three and a half years ago, investigators lifted an unknown print from the dust on murder victim Wendy Prescott's TV stand. Now they send that lift to the FBI for analysis.

Two weeks later, the iAPHIS system spits out a hit. The owner of the print, a man named Dale Devon Chenette. I had looked at that dust print so many times over the course of four years. It's almost ingrained in my memory. Crime scene investigator Joel Stevenson quickly confirms the match. I sit down, I guess, to take a breath because my part's done. And I look over and I think, wait a minute, I've got another latent print that's not identified. The print here on the left is the latent print.

Stevenson pulls out the latent print found on the deadbolt lock of the other murder victim, Christine Vu. You can see the scar. And compares it to ink prints from Dale Devon Shannette. There's a scar, big as daylight, that right index on the print card that we can see in the latent print. I'm like, I don't believe this, we've got him in both apartments. These individuals had no criminal history. The name Dale Devon Chenette rings a bell, and Detective Lenore finds him in the case file, flying below the radar.

I referred back to my sheet and saw that he was number 17. There was nothing significant about him that made him stick out. He was not the hunchback, one-eyed monster running through the village. At the time of Christine Vu's murder, Chenette lived in the Pear Tree apartment complex but had no criminal record. In 1999, his prints were rolled into the IAFA system

after a burglary arrest. Why are your latent prints inside this apartment? He denied ever being in the apartment. Lenore tracks down Chenette and brings him in for questioning. The suspect has no explanation for his fingerprints in the victim's apartments, nor any desire to donate saliva or strip down for investigators. I asked if he would voluntarily give us his samples and he refused.

And so we got an evidentiary search warrant and we, through a court order, obtained those things. We observed the injury to his penis. So we were very comfortable that we had the right person. In this case, Mr. Chenette did match the... On September 7, 2000, DNA specialist Connie Patton confirms the semen found in Christine Vu, Wendy Prescott, and Shima Benson belongs to Dale Devon Shannett. He did match, I believe,

at all 13 genetic loci that were examined. Shannett is arrested and asked to answer for his crimes. The opening statement was much like any opening statement I give. It's to tell them a story. Greg Miller is a prosecutor in Tarrant County, Texas. In January of 2003, he tells a jury the story of Dale Devon Shannette. I would describe Dale Shannette as a predator. Quite frankly, one of the worst I've seen in all the years I've been in this business.

He is evil. He's the worst of the worst. We had so much DNA evidence at that point. By the time trial begins, DNA has linked to an additional three rapes, bringing the total to five rapes and two murders. It was hard because I was angry. Shima Benson is just one of five rape victims in the courtroom. Four years after the attack, her anger still beats just below the surface. I wanted to jump across the podium and strangle him. On January 8, 2003,

Shanad is found guilty of capital murder. He draws the maximum penalty in the state of Texas, a date with a needle. Something as heinous as what he did deserves that kind of punishment, but another part of me wants him in the general population being raped by the other convicts. You know what I mean?

Like, being subjected to the same thing we've been subjected to. Dale Chenette, whether or not he needs to be on death row or not, I will tell you this, he doesn't need to be in society. For half a decade, Tommy Lenore hunted a man he came to know as a monster. Now the detective can put his case file away, secure in the knowledge that the monster is behind bars. The word joy and happy just don't come into play.

You still have ladies that are victimized. You still have the families who will live this for the rest of their lives. So there's no happiness, there's no joy, but there's tremendous satisfaction. There's satisfaction that I was privileged to be part of the investigation that got this monster and put him away. Investigators spent four years trying to find the person who had committed identical murders on two Arlington women. They collected a fingerprint from the bathtub and DNA from the victims. DNA, often seen as the ultimate evidence in any investigation, fell short in this case. It was the single fingerprint that helped

identify Dale Chenette as the murderer. The DNA was useful once Chenette was in custody. It linked him to the bathtub murders and also several other rapes and burglaries. He was convicted and sentenced to death. On February 10, 2009, the state of Texas executed Dale Devin Shannette. He didn't use his last minutes to ask for forgiveness or comfort a loved one. He simply made this statement, No cases ever tried have ever been error-free. Those are my words. No cases are error-free. are free. Cold Case Files is hosted by Brooke Giddings, produced by Scott Brody, McKamey Lynn, and Steve Delamater.

Our executive producer is Ted Butler. Original music by Blake Maples. We're distributed by Podcast One. The Cold Case Files TV series was produced by Curtis Productions and hosted by the one and only Bill Curtis. Check out more Cold Case Files at aetv.com. I'm Robby Achadri. I invite you to join me every Tuesday for new episodes of Nighty Night, bedtime stories to keep you awake, now on Podcast One.

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